Sometimes Safety is a Strange Priority

There is no winning for the airline industry these days. There's very little in the news when it comes to air travel that's good anymore. Some of the 'damage' is self-inflicted and some of it is due to the fact that regulations or circumstances make it so that an airline can't win or keep passengers happy. Rising operational costs coupled with new security regulations means that there's just too many opportunities to arise that make for 'interesting' (read that to mean horrendous and nightmarish) situations. Case in point would be a Continental Flight (operated by ExpressJet) that was scheduled to fly from Houston, Texas to Minneapolis, Minnesota on Friday night but didn't end up there until about Saturday morning.

Now to read the situation in the newspaper or to see the story in the news, you would automatically want to side with the passengers but then no one ever talks about how the airlines are dealing with it. I know it's probably not in vogue to side with the airlines (the big corporate giants that they are) but I feel that it would be the only way to understand the true nature of the situation and see how a lot of it is not a situation of its own doing. In the case of the ExpressJet flight I mentioned, it was diverted from Minneapolis after major thunderstorms erupted at their destination. Rather than risking a dangerous landing the flight crew (smartly) diverted to Rochester, New York. Given that there have been several reports in the news of passengers being injured when planes flew through storms and the resulting turbulence, it's no wonder the crew chose to divert rather than risk more negative press. Now under ordinary circumstances there wouldn't have been any coverage from this incident. It would have been just another normal airline diversion and not worth reporting. Now come the circumstances that make this story 'news worthy'. The flight was stuck on the tarmac for 9 hours and passengers were stuck in the plane for nearly the entire time. How? Read on.

So the airline landed in Rochester, however since it was after midnight the airport in Rochester was closed. Although ground crews were around, there were no security screening personnel from TSA. Think about it. If you've ever flown a late night flight you'll know that after a certain point at night the airport security gates are closed. Flights may arrive at the airport but they rarely will leave after the airport is closed. That being the case, why keep TSA screeners on duty the whole night for circumstances such as the ExpressJet flight? So the aircraft was on the ground but the passengers couldn't get down because there was no one there on the airport that could screen them again through security once they went to the bathroom or went to eat something. The reason being that if there was a terrorist among them, they would be able to hatch their plan in Rochester seeing as how they would have somehow 'known' that the flight would be diverted there.

So that's the reason behind the decision to keep the passengers on the plane. Until a TSA security crew arrived, they could not leave the aircraft until there was someone around to screen them. Since the flight arrived just after midnight, this would not happen until 6:00 AM on Saturday morning. Okay. So now you've got passengers aboard your plane for the next six hours at least, what do you do? Well you certainly can't feed them if the plane isn't carrying food. Most airlines these days carry very little food and that which they do carry they charge you for but in the case of regional jet carriers like ExpressJet, they generally don't carry anything since they aren't expecting long duration flights anyways. So then why not get the airport staff to bring food? Same reasons as before. If they airlines aren't going to operating at that time of night then why bother keeping the food staff on hand to hand out food? No reason whatsoever.

Now after 6:00 AM the passengers were allowed to get out of the plane for a bit. By this point the sole bathroom on the plane had begun to stink and the passengers were getting a bit angry (to say the least). But they couldn't leave at that point either. See, Federal Aviation Administration rules stipulate that pilots and flight crews are only allowed to operate for a set number of hours in the cockpit. If you hit that threshold then you are required by law to surrender the controls to a fresh crew. Contrary to what you may be thinking, airports don't have pilots and extra flight crews just hanging around waiting for the chance to fly a plane so it took time for the actual flight crew to come aboard and replace the original flight crew. By the time this occured and the flight finally left, it arrived nearly 12 hours after it was supposed to have arrived. Suddenly makes the case for driving cross-country all the more appealing doesn't it?

But leaving all these things aside, and given the circumstances, do you begin to see why the airlines are screwed no matter what they do? They can't offload passengers due to TSA regulations, they can't feed them because it adds to ticket costs which passengers aren't willing to pay, they can't fly after eight hours in the cockpit so they sit around and wait and then they take it on the chin in the press. Now in this case perhaps there were reasons to sympathize with the airlines in addition to the passengers but it certainly isn't always the case. All I can say is that the allure and glamour that once surrounded air travel is slowly losing its luster and is beginning to look a lot like a piece of tin rather than a piece of silver.